At the core of African American Christian experience is a long overlooked phenomenon, namely, the ingenuity of African American biblical interpretation. From the eighteenth century onward, African American Christian formations utilized the images, rhetoric, and messages of the sacred text as means of catalyzing political and social activity and shaping the world around them. The effects extended far beyond the black social world and indelibly marked the political, cultural, and religious arenas of the wider American landscape. Refused the fundamental rights granted by the United States Constitution, African Americans, nevertheless, made use of the nation’s other founding document—the Bible. With it, they endowed themselves with more than inalienable rights, but with the humanity that civil society had denied them. With Scripture in the public square, African Americans seized the interpretive moment to express a public faith equal to the contemporaneous social and political challenges facing their communities and they wielded the Bible to shape American society toward a radical vision of God’s justice. That interpretive tradition turned to the Exodus story more than any other text to interpret meaning in the social world. Beginning with the Antebellum period and continuing through Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, this study shows how interpretations of the Book of Exodus are themselves the locus of creative genius and a primary source for social transformation. By recovering a long established African American Scriptural interpretive tradition that placed the church at the intersection of biblical hermeneutics and the social world, Pillars of Cloud and Fire hopes to invite ecclesial communities into self-reflective discourses about their roles in resisting, affirming, and transforming contemporary social realities.